Mom and dad's urn

I’m at the choosing wood stage for mom and dad’s urn. I want it to be simple and elegant and surprisingly beautiful. I will need to summon all of my skill.

I’ve decided to go with my two favorite woods, walnut and padauk.

The base is a piece of 8/4 walnut I picked up today from my north sawyer, I have two now aren’t I special. Cost me 70$ and I’m only using half of it and had to glue up for width.

The lid is from some bookend pieces of walnut I’ve had about a year. My south sawyer gave them to me for about 5$ each. They didn’t make it to the kiln and are no where near straight but after cutting them to length and joining and planing I think this piece will work fine. It’s curly and crotchy and with the right finish will look outstanding.

The body of the box I’ll make out of this contiguous piece of Padauk so the grain will match perfectly. It’s 58” long and the box is 20” wide, so were looking at a 9 inch width on the box, 20X9×14 will be close to the final dimensions.

I will have to route the top and bottom, so I’m off to pick a profile and hope I have a bit big enough to use.

Any router bit suggestions welcome. I’m going to do a very traditional molding on the bottom and top, the top is no big issue, it’s 4/4, but some of you router experts can tell me how I can do 8/4 which I suspect is the same, just a little at a time.

Thanks for looking.

-- A positive attitude will take you much further than positive thinking ever will.